Salena Godden

Salena Godden FRSL is an award-winning author, poet and broadcaster of mixed Jamaican-Irish heritage. Her debut novel, 'Mrs Death Misses Death' won the Indie Book Award for Fiction and the People’s Book Prize, and was shortlisted for the British Book Awards and the Gordon Burn Prize. The highly-anticipated second novel set in the 'Mrs Death Misses Death' universe 'The Life Of Life' will be published by Canongate in 2026.

Her other books include the literary childhood memoir 'Springfield Road - A Poets Childhood Revisited' and two poetry collections 'With Love, Grief and Fury' and 'Pessimism is for Lightweights: 30 Pieces of Courage and Resistance'.

Her work has been shortlisted for the 4thWrite Short Story Prize, the Ted Hughes Award, Jerwood Compton Foundation, Bridport Poetry Prize and highly commended by the Forward Prize. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a Patron of Hastings Book Festival and an Honorary Fellow of West Dean, Sussex.